It would be easy to be a fake walking-based artist in the manner of Richard Long or Hamish Fulton. You wouldn’t have to go on a walk at all. You could just write in bold text:
24 HOURS, BLINDFOLDED, WALKING IN THE DESERT
or
365 DAYS OF PUTTING OUT THE GARBAGE, NOT THINKING
You thus employ a minimal strategy of writing to refer to an ephemeral practice that can never be adequately documented in the gallery setting, that can never literally take shape as an art work. But of course the question remains – was the experience of the walk the actual aesthetic phenomenon or was it the act of representing the walk in a highly restrained, linguistic, poetic fashion? And since language is so often identified with the conceptual, was it the underlying concept that was properly aesthetic, rather than the act of walking itself? Or are these two somehow bound together in ways that are difficult to precisely describe, that perhaps describe the specific nature of the brief title? Whatever, it is quite clear that I could lie about going on the walk and simply provide the title. This is to suggest, rather obviously, the semiotic status of this kind of walking based art project. As Umberto Eco explains, the fundamental nature of the sign is that it permits lying. It depends upon a crucial distance between sign and referent, in which truth is never guaranteed.